From integration to orchestration

Physical security has been integrating technologies for decades, but integration by itself doesn't fully describe what today's systems-of-systems technologies can accomplish. Orchestration goes beyond connecting technologies and exchanging information by coordinating their capabilities toward defined security purposes.

Data centers are now a rapidly growing pillar of national infrastructure. Applying lessons learned from past experience, designers of new AI-centric data center facilities are establishing multilayered, highly resilient cyber and physical protections designed to work in tandem against blended cyber-physical threats. The same systems-of-systems security thinking is increasingly applicable to manufacturing and other industries whose operations and assets are critical to business and society.

The recent book, Data Center Security: The Blueprint for Resilient Infrastructure (available on Amazon), by Chris Hills, Program Manager, North America | Architects, Consultants & Engineers at Brivo, provides an excellent systems-of-systems perspective on this new territory. Hills describes the challenge this way: “Leadership in this context is about orchestration. It is about ensuring that the myriad teams responsible for physical plant, IT operations, cloud services, compliance, and emergency response operate not in silos, but as an orchestra with a shared score. The conductor’s task is not to play every instrument, but to ensure that each contributes to the symphony of resilience.” Throughout the book, Hills grounds the concepts of integration and orchestration in detailed real-world examples that show how they are put to work in establishing organizational security capabilities.

This is an important expansion of how we have traditionally thought about physical security systems integration. Integration connects technologies and enables them to exchange information and invoke functions across system boundaries. Orchestration coordinates the contributions of technologies, people and processes toward defined security purposes. Effective orchestration makes those coordinated capabilities both adaptable and dependable.

From rigidity to adaptability

For decades, much of physical security dependability was achieved through rigidity. We strengthened security by hardening successive physical layers — site perimeters, building perimeters, interior boundaries and protected spaces — and maintaining their integrity. Detection identified attempted or successful penetration of those layers, while people and processes filled the prevention and detection gaps. These protections remain essential, but they are no longer the limits of what physical security can accomplish.

Traditional situational awareness was also largely reactive. Something happened, a sensor generated an alarm or a person observed something, and security personnel worked to determine what was occurring quickly enough to respond. When threats changed, strengthening security often meant adding barriers, sensors, cameras, personnel, procedures or additional layers.

From reactive to proactive situational awareness

Today’s technologies enable a very different level of capability. AI-enabled sensing and analysis can help identify the development of a threat situation rather than merely detect the resulting security event. Information from multiple systems can provide context, support human decision-making, and enable proactive prevention, intervention and response. The physical layers remain essential, but adaptable capabilities can now operate across and around them.

This changes the meaning of situational awareness. Instead of simply catching up with events already underway, physical security can increasingly recognize developing conditions early enough to influence their outcome. Systems-of-systems orchestration can bring together sensing, analysis, context, communications, human judgment and appropriate automated actions according to the situation at hand.

The technology is here now

None of this requires waiting for the next generation of physical security technology. The technologies needed to establish adaptable, orchestrated security capabilities are available today. Nor does future-readiness require predicting what tomorrow’s technologies will be. It requires thinking and planning that are adaptable enough to incorporate emerging technologies when they fit evolving security needs.

From technology functions to organizational capabilities

That is why operationalization matters. Installing and configuring technology establishes what the technology can do. Operationalizing it establishes what the organization can dependably do with it. As technologies become more capable, interconnected and intelligent, the difference between those two things becomes increasingly important.

A security technology implementation is not complete until it produces the information needed to manage the capability it provides and makes that management easy. Operational readiness establishes the ability to use the capability. Management readiness establishes the ability to manage it. Assured infrastructure service establishes the ability to depend on it over time.

The opportunity is ours

The opportunity is not simply to deploy more advanced technology. It is to establish stronger organizational security capabilities by more fully operationalizing the technologies already available to us, while designing for the capabilities that integration, orchestration and emerging technologies can provide.

The only real limitation now isn’t in the tools — it’s in how we think.